Publishing costs have gone down to approximately nil, while revenues have remained stable and profits have jumped sky high.
Riiight. Which is why the Big 6 publishers are doing so well (not) and places like Borders are thriving (cough).
Publishing costs -- editing, copy-editing, proofing, book design, cover design, etc, etc -- really haven't changed much, although e-books do eliminate most of the printing and distribution costs (maybe 1/3 of the wholesale cost of the book).
I do agree that $20 for an e-book is ridiculous -- as in fact do Amazon and others (the publisher's royalty percentage drops above $9.99) -- except perhaps for some low-volume, high-value works (think specialized texts) where the costs have to be spread over a smaller market.
Most indie publishers price e-books below the cost of a mass-market paperback, in some cases considerably below. The going price for established authors independantly selling their own back-list (or new stuff) is typically in the 2.99-5.99 range, with shorter works (or newbies trying to break in -- quality may vary) priced as low as 0.99.
When I put up my 1000-word story "Light Conversation" (published in Analog last year), I priced it the same as my other, 5000-word, short stories - 99 cents. It's about the price of a candy bar, lasts longer (unless you're a fast reader or slow eater), and won't rot your teeth. Five or six bucks for a novel is perfectly reasonable -- cheaper than a movie or even a discount DVD, and more hours of entertainment. If you want free, there's the library. (Or look for discounts by publishers/authors (including indies) trying to find new readers.)
I can see how it could lead to inefficient clutter
That's what multiple desktops are for. One for browsing, one for email, one for GIMP and its window collection, one for a bunch of xterms, etc... I can always drag stuff from one desktop to another if I want.
I see (thanks google) that in 1985 I contributed c64boot to the Kermit project to get files onto a Commodore 64... and at the other end of the scale I was wondering about C-Kermit for UTS (Amdahl's port of Unix to 370-architecture mainframes.) There was actually a connection (uh, sorry) there, both related to the project I was working on at the time.
(And when was the last time you saw an email addy like "ACDMAYER%UOGUELPH.BITNET@WISCVM" ?)
I found it a rather tedious video (the narrator could stand to speak at least twice as fast). But the propulsion system is never described in the movie Avatar, so he's just making a lot of assumptions. (I don't believe Alpha Centauri is ever mentioned by name either -- another assumption).
Either way he doesn't disprove anything: he sets up a strawman (his assumptions of how the Avatar starship worked) and knocks them down again. In the context of that strawman, he's right (at least, I assume so -- I skipped over a bunch of that video). But that's not to say there aren't other mechanisms for getting from here to there in reasonable (for some values of reasonable) time frames. Indeed there are, although they may be impractical for engineering or economic reasons, not scientific ones.
So I guess the desktop never really was a good product for the consumer market.
Not really, no. How many people outside of the slashdot crowd really want a general-purpose computer? They want appliances: a messaging appliance, a game appliance, a web-browsing appliance, a Facebook appliance...etc. A tablet is just a polymorphic appliance that can convert from one to the other at a touch of a (virtual) button, if need by downloading the necessary from the app(liance) store.
Where MS is really big server (and desktop) wise is enterprise servers. Active Directory really works well and a lot of companies use it.
Your second sentence above doesn't bear much on your first. Sure, they may use AD. That's one server. All (well, most) of the rest of their web, firewall, database, mail-filtering, etc servers are running Linux. (Even shops running Outlook servers for internal email often run Linux-based front-ends to do the filtering.)
The DVDs don't have ads in the middle of the shows, just a few when you insert the disc. About enough time to go get snacks or whatever before making yourself comfortable in front of the screen. One second (if that) of black screen between acts beats hell out of three minutes of commercials.
One could certainly turn this argument around and say we need *more* smart people doing finance,
God help us. No, the problem is that most "smart" people aren't nearly as smart as they think they are. Sure, they're a sigma, maybe even two, above the mean. They've always been in the upper percentiles, aced classes with little real work, and been smarter than most of the people they know. Which has given them an overinflated opinion of their own intelligence (you see the same thing in politics). They think they know everything.
the current crop of bozos keeps making messes the rest of society has to deal with.
And that's the result you get. Now, if you if you could get people even smarter than that -- three or four sigmas above the mean, for example -- people who are smart enough to realize that there's so much that they don't know, then you might be on to something. The problem is, it's a bell curve, and such outliers are but a fraction of the number of people even at one or two sigmas, let alone of the overall population. There aren't enough of them to go around.
This is less of a problem in the sciences and engineering disciplines because the real world has a way of slapping scientists and engineers upside the head to remind that they're not as smart as they think, usually before they've made some multi-billion dollar blunder that the rest of society has to deal with.
The market rate, BTW, is not what other companies in your industry pay but what the grad can get at any company.
+5 insightful
During my stint at HP (in the Fiorina/Hurd years), they kept cutting wages, bonuses, incentives etc to be "in line with industry averages". Which no doubt helps explain why HP is no longer the above average company they used to be.
In some cases it depends on the infromation. Personal information about you, for example, might be freely available to you but not to just anyone -- so you need to request it (with some proof of who you are). There's certainly plenty of information that is freely available (the number of web sites on the.gov TLD is boggling).
Yes, it does suck if you don't have a good reversion-of-rights clause in the contract. On the other hand, if the contract doesn't explicitly license electronic rights to the publisher (and assuming nothing like a blanket "all rights" grant), then you can still go ahead and e-pub yourself.
(Disclaimer: IANAL - but I am an author who has read plenty of publishing contracts and signed a few of them.)
if we had another Challenger-esque disaster, this time with, say, plutonium fuel, the repercussions would be much, much, much more immense
Oh, we've had one. The vehicle blew up (a Titan, if I recall correctly) shortly after launch, and the plutonium fuel canister (in an RTG, for the space probe) fell into the ocean... where it was recovered, cleaned off, and used in the backup spacecraft.
Want to argue that that was an RTG and not a NERVA-type engine? Okay. Rocket engines are designed to withstand thousands of PSI pressures at high temperature. Ditto a nuclear rocket engine. It'd survive an explosion (caused by what, exactly? there's no chemical combustion involved) of the vehicle pretty well.
Interestingly* enough, there's a short story in the latest issue of Analog Science Fiction (April 2011, may not be on the stands yet but subscribers should have it) that considers exactly that. The title is "Small Penalties". The penalty is small per incident, but it adds up. Not that what happens in the story is ever likely to happen (it's the magazine's "Probability Zero" feature) but we can dream.
(*Interesting to me, anyway, but then I wrote the story.)
When it was down to one state, you basically had one state's politicians supporting it.
Unfortunately, the Four Corners area really is out in the middle of nowhere; and Arizona, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico even together don't have huge clout in the House.
It would be nice if Amazon went DRM free for books like they did for music, but it is the publishers that force the issue, not Amazon.
The latter, exactly. It is entirely the publisher's decision. Indie author/publishers can chose, when publishing to Kindle, whether or not to apply DRM; most don't. (I have a few things up on Amazon for Kindle myself, without DRM.) Perhaps one day Amazon will impose royalty limits for DRMd books (as they do now with books outside of a certain price range) but I don't think they've quite got the leverage (or perhaps, the desire) to do so just yet.
It's the perfect excuse: "I was doing research for the novel I'm writing". Just be sure you've got enough of a first draft of that novel on your drive to be convincing.
(I am a writer. I have all kinds of weird stuff in my browsing history. Which gives me an idea for a crime thriller series, about a hit-man (or perhaps serial killer?) who writes mysteries. Or perhaps its been done. Anyone remember this movie?)
The last online game I played (not counting linked flight simulators) was probably xtrek, a predecessor to nettrek, which should date me. Frankly these days most computer RPGs bore me, perhaps because they are "light-weight worlds" -- their programmers invariably won't let me do certain things that ought to be possible. (Having programmed games myself I understand why this is so, but it doesn't make it any less frustrating.)
If human existence can be distilled to pure information then you could spend a near eternity exploring a virtual universe.
No, you (or I) couldn't, but a logical construct emulating you or me could. But where's the fun in that?
they felt the story was 'unimaginative' or 'run-of-the-mill.' Also, many people born later, such as my younger sister, who is very tech savvy herself, seemed to dismiss the plot and characters completely, instead speaking only of the quality of the graphics and the music. I believe this speaks to how the human race has grown out of its own imagination when it comes to technology since it entered the digital age. Young people can't see past the fact that there isn't a world inside the computer, that programs are just tools to be used by humans, and artificial intelligence is something discussed on a daily basis.
I felt exactly the same way about the original Tron, which I saw when it first came out. I'd been working with computers for a few years at that point. (Frankly I was annoyed at their use of "MCP" -- which was the actual name of the Burroughs Large Systems (eg B6700) OS -- as the bad guy.)
I'm an old fart, and I "can't see past the fact that there isn't a world inside the computer" either, because I know there isn't. It's an interesting abstraction, and handled well it can make for great stories (like Vinge's "True Names" and some of the better cyberpunk that followed it), but the "sensawunda" isn't there for anyone who knows how the things work -- just as space-oriented sci-fi lost much of its sensawunda when Apollo missions started to make walking on the Moon look routine, and Mariner and Viking showed Mars to be a lot deader than we'd hoped.
It's easier to make up -- and to believe -- stories about things that are unknown, like far-off lands a couple of centuries ago, the solar system sixty years ago, or computers (for most people) thirty years ago, than it is to make up believable stories about that which is so well-known as to be mundane. (Fantasy stories -- including urban fantasy, paranormal romance, and the likes of Star Wars -- covenant with the reader/viewer to suspend disbelief going into it. It's a "we both know this couldn't happen, but let's pretend" vs the harder-SF "what if this could happen" covenant.)
It's not an age thing, it's a knowledge thing. It also has nothing to do with a lack of imagination: I am (among other things) a professional science fiction & fantasy writer; I get paid to imagine things.
The great experiment in reusable space craft turned out to be a massive money hole
Oh? Has anyone actually tried that experiment yet?
And no, Shuttle doesn't count: the external tanks are thrown away, the SRB's are more crash'n'salvage than reusable (take a look at what actually gets reused), and the Orbiter undergoes a major overhaul after every mission.
There have been experimental prototypes of reusable vehicles. DC-X for example, which demonstrated successful intact launch-abort capability as well as rapid turnaround (two launches within 24 hours), but (being a test bed) was not designed to reach orbit.
And don't talk to me about X-33; that was a boondoggle from the start, and many of us said so.
Blair Witch was a fluke. Name three other movies that cost less than $100K to make and grossed over $100M, or even $10M. Heck, an effects-heavy TV series like Stargate SG-1, shot in Vancouver to be cheaper than Hollywood, was over $1M per episode to shoot, and that was more than a decade ago.
Primer hasn't quite made $0.5 million, although that's a much more cerebral movie than Blair Witch so would never be a box office hit.
Plays don't need filming, editing, soundtrack, musical score, generally (not always) have fewer actors, many fewer sets, and no location shooting.
No, movie making doesn't have to be expensive, but if you don't have studio (or some other well-heeled backer) money behind you it's a serious investment for an individual or two to make.
Slashdot Mirror
Publishing costs have gone down to approximately nil, while revenues have remained stable and profits have jumped sky high.
Riiight. Which is why the Big 6 publishers are doing so well (not) and places like Borders are thriving (cough).
Publishing costs -- editing, copy-editing, proofing, book design, cover design, etc, etc -- really haven't changed much, although e-books do eliminate most of the printing and distribution costs (maybe 1/3 of the wholesale cost of the book).
I do agree that $20 for an e-book is ridiculous -- as in fact do Amazon and others (the publisher's royalty percentage drops above $9.99) -- except perhaps for some low-volume, high-value works (think specialized texts) where the costs have to be spread over a smaller market.
Most indie publishers price e-books below the cost of a mass-market paperback, in some cases considerably below. The going price for established authors independantly selling their own back-list (or new stuff) is typically in the 2.99-5.99 range, with shorter works (or newbies trying to break in -- quality may vary) priced as low as 0.99.
When I put up my 1000-word story "Light Conversation" (published in Analog last year), I priced it the same as my other, 5000-word, short stories - 99 cents. It's about the price of a candy bar, lasts longer (unless you're a fast reader or slow eater), and won't rot your teeth. Five or six bucks for a novel is perfectly reasonable -- cheaper than a movie or even a discount DVD, and more hours of entertainment. If you want free, there's the library. (Or look for discounts by publishers/authors (including indies) trying to find new readers.)
I can see how it could lead to inefficient clutter
That's what multiple desktops are for. One for browsing, one for email, one for GIMP and its window collection, one for a bunch of xterms, etc... I can always drag stuff from one desktop to another if I want.
I see (thanks google) that in 1985 I contributed c64boot to the Kermit project to get files onto a Commodore 64 ... and at the other end of the scale I was wondering about C-Kermit for UTS (Amdahl's port of Unix to 370-architecture mainframes.) There was actually a connection (uh, sorry) there, both related to the project I was working on at the time.
(And when was the last time you saw an email addy like "ACDMAYER%UOGUELPH.BITNET@WISCVM" ?)
(ob. "All you kids get off my lawn!")
I found it a rather tedious video (the narrator could stand to speak at least twice as fast). But the propulsion system is never described in the movie Avatar, so he's just making a lot of assumptions. (I don't believe Alpha Centauri is ever mentioned by name either -- another assumption).
Either way he doesn't disprove anything: he sets up a strawman (his assumptions of how the Avatar starship worked) and knocks them down again. In the context of that strawman, he's right (at least, I assume so -- I skipped over a bunch of that video). But that's not to say there aren't other mechanisms for getting from here to there in reasonable (for some values of reasonable) time frames. Indeed there are, although they may be impractical for engineering or economic reasons, not scientific ones.
So I guess the desktop never really was a good product for the consumer market.
Not really, no. How many people outside of the slashdot crowd really want a general-purpose computer? They want appliances: a messaging appliance, a game appliance, a web-browsing appliance, a Facebook appliance ...etc. A tablet is just a polymorphic appliance that can convert from one to the other at a touch of a (virtual) button, if need by downloading the necessary from the app(liance) store.
Where MS is really big server (and desktop) wise is enterprise servers. Active Directory really works well and a lot of companies use it.
Your second sentence above doesn't bear much on your first. Sure, they may use AD. That's one server. All (well, most) of the rest of their web, firewall, database, mail-filtering, etc servers are running Linux. (Even shops running Outlook servers for internal email often run Linux-based front-ends to do the filtering.)
The DVDs don't have ads in the middle of the shows, just a few when you insert the disc. About enough time to go get snacks or whatever before making yourself comfortable in front of the screen. One second (if that) of black screen between acts beats hell out of three minutes of commercials.
One could certainly turn this argument around and say we need *more* smart people doing finance,
God help us. No, the problem is that most "smart" people aren't nearly as smart as they think they are. Sure, they're a sigma, maybe even two, above the mean. They've always been in the upper percentiles, aced classes with little real work, and been smarter than most of the people they know. Which has given them an overinflated opinion of their own intelligence (you see the same thing in politics). They think they know everything.
the current crop of bozos keeps making messes the rest of society has to deal with.
And that's the result you get. Now, if you if you could get people even smarter than that -- three or four sigmas above the mean, for example -- people who are smart enough to realize that there's so much that they don't know, then you might be on to something. The problem is, it's a bell curve, and such outliers are but a fraction of the number of people even at one or two sigmas, let alone of the overall population. There aren't enough of them to go around.
This is less of a problem in the sciences and engineering disciplines because the real world has a way of slapping scientists and engineers upside the head to remind that they're not as smart as they think, usually before they've made some multi-billion dollar blunder that the rest of society has to deal with.
The market rate, BTW, is not what other companies in your industry pay but what the grad can get at any company.
+5 insightful
During my stint at HP (in the Fiorina/Hurd years), they kept cutting wages, bonuses, incentives etc to be "in line with industry averages". Which no doubt helps explain why HP is no longer the above average company they used to be.
In a word, bullshit.
Research money rarely comes from "investment banks and the financial services industry" -- they don't invest in anything as risky as research.
By the way, I'm writing this as a chemist who changed careers and became a programmer for the finance industry.
Well, at least we know who butters your bread. Not that that would influence your opinion, of course.
They want the ad revenue AND the monthly "rent"
Which is why I don't watch TV anymore. Oh, I watch TV series ... by buying* the episodes on DVD. No commercials, no monthly fees.
* Or in some cases, borrowing them from my local public library. I'll let them worry about the copyright licensing issues of that.
In some cases it depends on the infromation. Personal information about you, for example, might be freely available to you but not to just anyone -- so you need to request it (with some proof of who you are). There's certainly plenty of information that is freely available (the number of web sites on the .gov TLD is boggling).
Yes, it does suck if you don't have a good reversion-of-rights clause in the contract. On the other hand, if the contract doesn't explicitly license electronic rights to the publisher (and assuming nothing like a blanket "all rights" grant), then you can still go ahead and e-pub yourself.
(Disclaimer: IANAL - but I am an author who has read plenty of publishing contracts and signed a few of them.)
I have about 20 out of print books that would have netted me some nice cash
If you're convinced that's true, digitize them yourself and self-pub on Kindle, PubIt, Smashwords, etc. It's not that hard.
They're never going to make more money in any event.
And if you're convinced that that is true, why should Google pay you anything?
Heck, tell us what the books are and maybe I'd be willing to fork over $1200 to buy out your copyrights. Or you could put them up for bid on eBay.
those that want their out-of-print book to stay out of print because they have some grand plan to reissue it some day.
There's potentially a lot of money in the back list for authors -- or their estates -- who want to put their own stuff up in e-book format these days.
In aggregate, probably a hell of a lot more than $125M worth.
if we had another Challenger-esque disaster, this time with, say, plutonium fuel, the repercussions would be much, much, much more immense
Oh, we've had one. The vehicle blew up (a Titan, if I recall correctly) shortly after launch, and the plutonium fuel canister (in an RTG, for the space probe) fell into the ocean ... where it was recovered, cleaned off, and used in the backup spacecraft.
Want to argue that that was an RTG and not a NERVA-type engine? Okay. Rocket engines are designed to withstand thousands of PSI pressures at high temperature. Ditto a nuclear rocket engine. It'd survive an explosion (caused by what, exactly? there's no chemical combustion involved) of the vehicle pretty well.
Interestingly* enough, there's a short story in the latest issue of Analog Science Fiction (April 2011, may not be on the stands yet but subscribers should have it) that considers exactly that. The title is "Small Penalties". The penalty is small per incident, but it adds up. Not that what happens in the story is ever likely to happen (it's the magazine's "Probability Zero" feature) but we can dream.
(*Interesting to me, anyway, but then I wrote the story.)
When it was down to one state, you basically had one state's politicians supporting it.
Unfortunately, the Four Corners area really is out in the middle of nowhere; and Arizona, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico even together don't have huge clout in the House.
It would be nice if Amazon went DRM free for books like they did for music, but it is the publishers that force the issue, not Amazon.
The latter, exactly. It is entirely the publisher's decision. Indie author/publishers can chose, when publishing to Kindle, whether or not to apply DRM; most don't. (I have a few things up on Amazon for Kindle myself, without DRM.) Perhaps one day Amazon will impose royalty limits for DRMd books (as they do now with books outside of a certain price range) but I don't think they've quite got the leverage (or perhaps, the desire) to do so just yet.
It's the perfect excuse: "I was doing research for the novel I'm writing". Just be sure you've got enough of a first draft of that novel on your drive to be convincing.
(I am a writer. I have all kinds of weird stuff in my browsing history. Which gives me an idea for a crime thriller series, about a hit-man (or perhaps serial killer?) who writes mysteries. Or perhaps its been done. Anyone remember this movie?)
Haven't played many MMOs have you?
The last online game I played (not counting linked flight simulators) was probably xtrek, a predecessor to nettrek, which should date me. Frankly these days most computer RPGs bore me, perhaps because they are "light-weight worlds" -- their programmers invariably won't let me do certain things that ought to be possible. (Having programmed games myself I understand why this is so, but it doesn't make it any less frustrating.)
If human existence can be distilled to pure information then you could spend a near eternity exploring a virtual universe.
No, you (or I) couldn't, but a logical construct emulating you or me could. But where's the fun in that?
they felt the story was 'unimaginative' or 'run-of-the-mill.' Also, many people born later, such as my younger sister, who is very tech savvy herself, seemed to dismiss the plot and characters completely, instead speaking only of the quality of the graphics and the music. I believe this speaks to how the human race has grown out of its own imagination when it comes to technology since it entered the digital age. Young people can't see past the fact that there isn't a world inside the computer, that programs are just tools to be used by humans, and artificial intelligence is something discussed on a daily basis.
I felt exactly the same way about the original Tron, which I saw when it first came out. I'd been working with computers for a few years at that point. (Frankly I was annoyed at their use of "MCP" -- which was the actual name of the Burroughs Large Systems (eg B6700) OS -- as the bad guy.)
I'm an old fart, and I "can't see past the fact that there isn't a world inside the computer" either, because I know there isn't. It's an interesting abstraction, and handled well it can make for great stories (like Vinge's "True Names" and some of the better cyberpunk that followed it), but the "sensawunda" isn't there for anyone who knows how the things work -- just as space-oriented sci-fi lost much of its sensawunda when Apollo missions started to make walking on the Moon look routine, and Mariner and Viking showed Mars to be a lot deader than we'd hoped.
It's easier to make up -- and to believe -- stories about things that are unknown, like far-off lands a couple of centuries ago, the solar system sixty years ago, or computers (for most people) thirty years ago, than it is to make up believable stories about that which is so well-known as to be mundane. (Fantasy stories -- including urban fantasy, paranormal romance, and the likes of Star Wars -- covenant with the reader/viewer to suspend disbelief going into it. It's a "we both know this couldn't happen, but let's pretend" vs the harder-SF "what if this could happen" covenant.)
It's not an age thing, it's a knowledge thing. It also has nothing to do with a lack of imagination: I am (among other things) a professional science fiction & fantasy writer; I get paid to imagine things.
The great experiment in reusable space craft turned out to be a massive money hole
Oh? Has anyone actually tried that experiment yet?
And no, Shuttle doesn't count: the external tanks are thrown away, the SRB's are more crash'n'salvage than reusable (take a look at what actually gets reused), and the Orbiter undergoes a major overhaul after every mission.
There have been experimental prototypes of reusable vehicles. DC-X for example, which demonstrated successful intact launch-abort capability as well as rapid turnaround (two launches within 24 hours), but (being a test bed) was not designed to reach orbit.
And don't talk to me about X-33; that was a boondoggle from the start, and many of us said so.
Blair Witch was a fluke. Name three other movies that cost less than $100K to make and grossed over $100M, or even $10M. Heck, an effects-heavy TV series like Stargate SG-1, shot in Vancouver to be cheaper than Hollywood, was over $1M per episode to shoot, and that was more than a decade ago.
Primer hasn't quite made $0.5 million, although that's a much more cerebral movie than Blair Witch so would never be a box office hit.
Plays don't need filming, editing, soundtrack, musical score, generally (not always) have fewer actors, many fewer sets, and no location shooting.
No, movie making doesn't have to be expensive, but if you don't have studio (or some other well-heeled backer) money behind you it's a serious investment for an individual or two to make.
Agreed. That and cut congressional perks too.